There is nothing you can add to this statement. It is what it is. Familiarity is the only thing people desire which they will never get. Life is never, if ever, familiar. We are always, and I mean, always, in flux, in motion, in change. As the old philosophers proclaimed, we will never set foot in the same river twice. At first, this might read strange, but when you really think about it, it rings so true. Every morning that you wake up, you have a host of different, new, and transformed memories of who you are. You will never wake up the same person as before.
Life loves to throw these curveballs, and all we have to do is to either get up, or try and dodge them. If we all life to keep on throwing these punches, we will lie on the ground, never to get up again, and to be killed by our own insecurities and problems.
We are always in a process of transformation. We move from one moment to the next. And we are allowed, with modern technology, to record these processes, these motions, the transformations. We are allowed to take photographs, to write down memories, to videograph moments otherwise fleeting and momentary. And this might be our biggest vice, as we yearn to relive the past through the present. We always seek pleasure in the past, when we lay awake at night, we scroll through pictures, words, videos, of the past, to take us back to those moments, but in the present. And when we are ripped from accessing these locked memories, we feel almost like we lost a limb.
it can literally feel like we lost something so integral to us,
that we feel heartbroken, as if we lost a limb, as if we lost a loved one.
Recently, I suffered such a severance, and it is hurtful. We are always told to be strong, to not hold onto material things, because everything can change in an instant. And it does. It did. And we can do nothing about it, and even if we convince ourselves that we do not care, that we are "strong" and that material things do not affect us, it does. If we lose a photograph of a special moment, we feel a deep sense of regret of this loss, almost as if some part of the memory is taken with it. We feel this tense moment in which a part of us is ripped from our very skin. It hurts, it burns, and we feel devastated by the loss. It does not compare to losing someone close to you, and that is not what I am trying to say. But the loss is comparable. Almost as if you lost a past version of either yourself, or your loved one. Because, methinks, this is to some degree true. If we lose photographs, notes, videos, of our past selves and our loved ones, we lose so access to those memories. We only have so much memory, and we process so much in any given day, that photographs and all of these things serve as lifelines to previous versions of ourselves.
I am sitting and writing these words with a deep sense of loss, linked with a deep understanding of what it means to be human; that is, to be alive at this moment, to have links to the past, and how vulnerable all of these links are.
Moments of absolute disruption and change re-awakens the feeling that we as humans are so vulnerable, and susceptible to the dangers of bad deeds. We are alive in strange times, where you can literally have everything that is near and dear to you in your pocket. And this makes us even more vulnerable than we were, to begin with.
And this is scary. To be human is to be vulnerable, and this fact is seriously scary. Because there is always someone out there that wants to exploit this vulnerability...
I hope that you are doing well and that loss in any form does not come across your path too often... It is never nice to deal with it.
All of the writings are my own, albeit inspired by a moment I would rather forget. The photograph used is also my own, taken with my Nikon D300.